Ant colony based routing strategy in UAV delay tolerant networks

Abstract

Flying a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with mutual sense and communication capability in the air space, a late-model airborne perceptive network accordingly takes shape. Among all research issues about it, routing strategy is the prior problem that significantly blocks the whole efficacious communication, because this three-dimensional architecture features randomly violent topological changes and usable paths generate in an unpredictable moment. In this paper, we consider an exploration-exploitation trade-off in this specific delay tolerant network (DTN). The pivotal conception is the resultant of heuristic information and ant pheromone based on the ant foraging behavior. A fuzzy inference system is introduced to calculate the heuristic information using approximate reasoning, which helps ant routing. The simulation witnesses the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism in the end. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.